Gears 5

Gears 5 is a great game that covers up its spots with an incredibly strong sense of style and good encounter design. Although a strangely arbitrary player choice in the final chapter somewhat hinders it from sticking the landing, it doesn't take away from the many hours of great gunfights contained within the rest of the campaign.

The choice to shift the focus from JD to Kait goes a long way in making a story that the player might actually find themselves invested in. I never found JD to be particularly interesting, and the first act of the game cements him as truly dislikeable. It's no coincidence that the game's strongest act is the one where he is not present.

Most of the story beats serve as excuses to ferry the player between scenic battle arenas, but that never bothers you when the locations are as beautiful as they are here. Piloting the skiff across the red sand dunes in is only surpassed by the deep snow through which Kait and Del trudge, before descending into frozen caves and corridors.

The multiplayer is – as it always is in these games – fun. The new Escape multiplayer mode is tricky to figure out, and doesn't work very well with randoms, but get a group together and you should have a blast. Bonus points for including Kat and Emile from Halo Reach as DLC characters.

Gears 5 mostly gives you more and better looking gears, and that's all it really has to do to be a pretty great game.

Gears of War is a franchise that seemingly hasnt evolved at all from its debut, which is considered to be one of the hallmarks of the 7th gen console era. cover shooters have com and gone, and third person shooters in general have evolved into much more dynamic affair, in which sticky cover is often considered antiquated. Seems like the team developing this one had none to do with that, and tried to deliver a cover shooter like in the glory days of Xbox 360.

Visually the game is a bit subpar, looking at youtube footage. I cant really comment on this part of the game as my pc degraded its textures so much, that the texture work i see is worst than the original Quake. Sonicwise it does its job alright, with unmemorable soundtrack but good voice acting.

Storywise its just dude bros shooting up aliens, with some attempts at emocional beats that end up either falling flat or short. Maybe its me, since i havent played any Gears since the original, but its hard to care for these characters or lore. I do enjoy the comic relief a lot of them bring, and in this sense this is much improved over the original overly bleak atmosphere.

Gameplaywise it offers a simply cover shooter. Enemies take a long while to kill, and it encourages flanking and the use of the games rather creative weapons. There is a new focus on the robotic allie, in which you can upgrade with components found throughout the levels, and its abilities are really useful on the battle. You cant control what allies are doing though, and the AI is idiotic. But the gunplay is solid, the gore is satisfying, the enemy types diverse enough to make each fight feel unique despite playing out in very similar ways.

Its biggest innovation is the semi open nature of acts 2 and 3, which offer some sidequests that reward you with upgrade parts for your robot. They are enjoyable enough to look for them and complete them, but they are nothing more than side diversions.

Overal Gears 5 is a solid action cover shooter, but it feels tired and antiquated in a lot of ways. It fails to revitalize the franchise, but i dont think thats what they were going for anyway.

Gears 5 is the first Gears of War game I played (I never owned an Xbox) courtesy of Game Pass for PC very generously giving us the game at launch. So I don't know how it compares to previous installments in the franchise, but critics are saying this is a return to form which kinda leaves me puzzled since I have mixed reactions about the game.

Right off the bat I felt the controls were awkward. For some reason they decided to put space as the running button instead of shift which took me a while to while get used it, but aside from that the general slow movement feels very clunky. Going in and out of cover doesn't feel fluid either, it felt like a clunky mechanic that 10 year old game like Mass Effect 2 did better. The general gameplay isn't anything we've never seen, most of the campaign has battles like we've seen in previous FPS games. It's not that it's bad or anything, but everything feels very generic and they just threw millions of dollars on the graphics rather than innovative gameplay.

In general the enemies are bullet sponges that take a while to kill, doesn't really matter which weapons you are using the whole strategy is going in and out of cover and shooting them out. Your robot buddy Jack does bring in some nice abilities like scanning and cloaking, and later in the game an ability that makes an enemy join your team for several seconds which I found to be really overpowered. The locations of the missions are huge but it's mostly all linear, there's only one way to go to make things progress with little hidden things here and there on the way. Act 2 and 3 introduces optional objectives which lets you have the top level abilities on your Jack, but I didn't bother with those much and could completely the game on Intermediate difficulty without any problems.

The best aspect of the game is definitely the story. Especially how it builds up in Act 2, there's some really twisted shit that you will discover and makes the game really interesting and I was really getting into the lore despite not having played the previous games. It continues building up after that, but then it has a anti-climatic sort of "to be continued" type of ending that is just blah... really disappointing in that aspect that it doesn't conclude things well. I enjoyed the character interactions, the dialogue is full of sarcasm and witty replies and in between areas your characters speak a lot of each other building up their personal relationship reminiscent of how they did it in The Last of Us. That's what kept me playing and I really wanted to see how things panned out, and it was an enjoyable ride overall.

I can't say that Gears 5 is a great game, and I'm definitely not an FPS expert or anything, but most of the recent ones I've played I thought they were better. The innovations in the game are minimal and everything is invested in the big cut-scenes and the beautiful graphics, the areas are huge and you have a ton of visuals to see in your playthrough. The action in the game never gets thrilling because of the slow movement and even near of the game the battles start to feel samey-samey as no new enemies or weapons are introduced. I haven't tried the multiplayer modes yet, but a quick glance shows a microtransaction shop which is not a good look (I haven't verified if it's only cosmetics or P2W elements), but I don't think that this is the type of game that I would really invest much in the multiplayer mode given the slow movement nature of the game. On the whole I don't think that Gears 5 does anything particularly wrong, it just doesn't do anything particularly great. It's an FPS by the numbers with high production values, which I enjoyed my time with it somewhat. Worth the 5$ on gamepass, but definitely not a full price purchase.